Next week is Mental Health Awareness Week, 9-15th May 2022. This year it focuses on loneliness, which is affecting more people in the UK than ever previously. Loneliness has a powerful impact on our physical and mental health and has worsened since the pandemic.

Improving the feeling of loneliness, is a cry out to build stronger communities, make connections between ourselves, and learn how to be supportive to each other. Those connections and communities can be family, friends, or groups of a shared belonging. We need your help to kick-start a new support initiative within our ACID community.

The week’s objective is to raise awareness for everyone to take stock and look after themselves and each other not only this week but throughout the year. Most people will have suffered from some type of mental health issue in their past or currently, so it is paramount for this occasion to be a moment of self-reflection, self-care, and reaching out to each other.

ACID has built a community for designers, where designers can have their exciting moments celebrated and championed. Where you can receive education, knowledge, or support if you find yourself in the distraught position of having been copied. We understand, if you’re a designer, creative, or small business owner, how utterly heart-breaking it can be to not know where to turn when your livelihood is under threat.

Sadly, as a result of the endemic copycat culture, designers have told us, they no longer want to design any longer and businesses have folded because of the strain of defending their rights. The emotional effect is devastating when energy is sapped, time and funds spent trying to seek redress, whilst the copycats of this world march forward leaving a trail of mayhem behind them. Being copied can be a very lonely time.

So, for Mental Health Awareness Week this year, our shout out to designers is: We understand and we are here to listen to you. Don’t feel you need to go it alone. Contact us via the normal ways if you need IP support by all means. But we also want to hear your stories to see how we can help.

We would like to start a season of discussion based on the emotional effect of being copied.

One of our members, Charlotte Smithson, is going to collaborate with us on this topic. She is a talented artist who creates immersive installations of flora suspended in glassware. The effect is one of calmness, gentle contemplation, and a stronger connection to nature through the minutia of delicate plant life. Charlotte also delivers creative wellbeing projects as part of her social practice.

We would like to invite designers to talk to us about your experiences of being copied.

• How has it affected you emotionally?
• What was the outcome?
• Did you find any coping mechanisms to pull you through?

You don’t need you to send us essays, just a simple discussion on how you felt or feel. You are welcome to message us via email: [email protected]  or [email protected], or DM us through Instagram: @anti.copying.in.design or @f_e_s_t_o_o_n. We would like to share your stories with our followers, in the effort of opening up to the community so other designers don’t feel so alone. However, if you wish it to be anonymous, please do say and we’ll be happy to respect your choice.

Charlotte Smithson says, “I’m not sure anything equips you for the emotional impact of having your work copied. Anger, sadness, fear, disbelief – it can be an emotional rollercoaster and incredibly isolating. Lots of designers experience this at least once in their career, which means there is a rich seam of advice, support and lived experience amongst our community. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to tap into this and learn from one another’s experiences?”

ACID CEO Dids Macdonald, OBE, said, “As most of the creative industries are lone, micro or SME it can often be isolating work, but the challenges are even more heightened when copying occurs, especially to one’s mental well-being. ACID is a strong community of people like you and the more we share some of the darker moments with each other, the more resilience we can all build. A personal plea from me is to share your well-being concerns and we can act as a conduit to connect you with others. A problem shared can often be a solution found….”

Once we have started the dialogue, we aim to build some well-being and recovery tips to share for designers who could benefit from our community’s support.

We are also inviting our members to take over ACID’s Instagram account for one day to share their personal wellbeing tips for overcoming copying. This is a first for ACID and if you’d like to take part, we’d love to hear from you!

As a design community, let’s build a stronger, more connected network of support!

If you are currently experiencing mental health issues, there are resources you can get in touch with here.